I first encountered Francis Adams when various sharp or mordant observations from his The Australians kept cropping up in my reading about Henry Lawson and his times. For one thing, Adams’s widow, Edith (though there is apparently doubt about their marital status), invited Lawson and his wife, Bertha, to stay with her in the village of Harpenden while they looked for accommodation. Lawson duly rented ‘Spring Villa’ in Cowper Road, Harpenden, and thus began his disastrous English sojourn.

I developed a mental picture of Adams as lugubrious, gloomy, a denizen of the night! This, I now discover, was very much the Francis Adams of an 1887 portrait, reproduced in Meg Tasker’s admirable biography, in which he is darkly – even sinisterly – handsome, brooding, unsmiling, his gaze fixed and lambent. Of ‘Francis W.L. Adams … young poet and man of letters’ who, bespectacled, scholarly, trimly groomed (but still unsmiling), is pictured elsewhere in this book, I knew little. Tasker, of course, counterpoints these two aspects of her subject and provides a great deal in between.